Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
CIOs stand at a crossroads as we head into 2013. Many of them have a choice to make. They can retreat to the back-office or reach out to business units and began to partner with them on customer-facing innovation and revenue generation. Many CIOs I know will choose to breakout of the IT department mindset – or already have. However, they have a lot of changes to make to cultivate the relationships and acquire the […]
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Moving Forward in a Complex Hyper-connected New World.
Simple View – Cognition Multi-Lateral View – Cognition System is the Method:- Cognition – result of social observation Where each social unit employs relevant symbols to capture the knowledge and each of these knowledge could be a different level of abstraction. Enterprise or System Architecture as a architecture is sum of several architecture abstractions (various […]
In the early days of aviation, when instruments were unreliable or non-existent, pilots often had to make judgments by instinct. This was known as “flying by the seat of your pants.” It was exciting, but error prone, and accidents were frequent. Today, enterprises are in that position with Cloud Computing. Continue reading →
Some @ATKearney consultants have written an interesting article on Business Network Optimization
“Anyone thinking about rationalizing a network would naturally ask whether so many nodes are really necessary. Networks are a great deal more complicated than that, and managing them requires expansive strategic imagination.”
A simplistic accountancy view of a network looks at the direct contribution of each node. From this viewpoint, some nodes may not produce enough direct value to justify their continued existence, and there will be calls for these nodes to be closed or merged with their neighbours.
For example, there are several proposals currently under consideration within the UK National Health Service to rationalize Accident and Emergency provision by closing some hospital departments and relocating staff. These proposals are based on arguments about the optimal size of an Accident and Emergency unit, and on claims that smaller units are unlikely to deliver value for money or clinical excellence.
Opponents of these closures point to the indirect effect of these closures, including the likely consequences on non-emergency healthcare services at those hospitals that will lack accident and emergency provision, as well as the wider social impact on the local community.
The example given in the A.T. Kearney article is the French postal service, and the authors assert the indirect value of the village post office, using an almost untranslatable French term l’animation du territoire, the “animation of the territory”.
The Kearney article identifies three types of business network, which it calls Production, Service and Distribution, and eight elements of network management which must be optimized together. It calls these KNOTs, which stands for Kearney Network Optimization Tools, and asks us not to think of them as merely a laundry list of best practices used to build an optimal network.
The article illustrates the concept of indirect value in terms of the cross-over between physical and online retailing. If a customer views a product in a physical store and then orders it online, the physical store is providing some indirect value to the retail operation as a whole. It is therefore makes sense to optimize the entire online/offline network as a whole, rather than regarding them as two separate networks. See my post on Showrooming and Multi-sided Markets (December 2012).
If you believe the popular media, 2013 was never supposed to happen. The Mayan culture had this all figured out, or maybe their Strategic Planning Group got axed due to budget cuts. Either way – 2013 was supposed to end in December of 2012. As it is,…
